Watch Something Heartbreaking, Watch Your Daughter Dance
by shaping-up-to-be-pretty-ood
Summary: Amy's quest to find her missing iPod quickly morphs into a beautiful discovery and a heartbreaking truth.


"Rory?" Random objects flew out of the nightstand beside the bed at Amy's hands, some of them narrowly missing her husband. "Have you seen my iPod?"

"Nope."

She made a frustrated noise in the back of her throat. "If it fell out of my pocket when we were being chased by those dog-people things I'm making the Doctor go back. Not only can i not stand all this without my music, but it would probably change the course of their history or something stupid like that. Ugh! It's not in here! I'm going to go ask our friendly neighborhood alien if he's seen it."

"Should I put everything back in the nightstand?"

Amy paused, one hand on the doorframe. Then she whipped around with a brilliant smile on her face. "You know exactly what to say to make me want to snog you senseless." A light skip formed as she headed off to find her alien, leaving Rory with a knowing sort of grin as he started cleaning up their room.

xXx

"Doc-tor...?" Her word trailed off quietly when she realized he couldn't even hear her. She supposed she should've been cross with him for stealing her iPod, but watching him absentmindedly dance around the console, mesmerizingly flipping switches and pressing buttons made it impossible. It was different than how he'd danced at the wedding- she could practically see the music flowing off him, hear it in her head, and it was just breathtaking. The man who made a habit of running into things and tripping over himself was whirling around the room like four ballroom dancers at once. Standing on the balcony above the stairs just watching in awe made Amy feel slightly voyeuristic, like this was something she was never supposed to see. This was usually the time she and Rory allotted for sleep, and they both knew the Doctor didn't sleep as much as they did. Still, she never would've guessed _this _was what he did.

Sinking down to sit on the top step with her chin in her hands, she watched for what must have been fifteen or twenty minutes before the Doctor finally caught sight of her. He yanked the headphones out and abruptly stopped, just staring with impossibly wide eyes. The silence was broken with his faint whisper: "You have very nice taste in music."

"You have... _incredible _dancing skills," she replied just as softly. "It's kind of heartbreaking to watch you move."

"I learned it from River. You want to watch something heartbreaking, watch your daughter dance. I've never seen anything quite like her." He smiled a bit. "Her names fit her so well- Melody Pond, the woman who can pour every bit of her soul into the slightest bit of movement and be still enough to reflect you back to you, and River Song, a crashing, roaring, constant flow of passion and emotion that will pull you in and deafen you, just absolutely consume you until you wash up on a bank at the end, somehow, illogically, impossibly, wishing for that roar of emotion to be surrounding you again because you'd rather drown in it that starve and freeze without."

The sheer depth and proufoundness of that cascaded over Amy like someone pouring a bucket of hot water over her head. It was rare that the Doctor was so vulnerable.

"You see her die, don't you? I can tell. You love her, you love my daughter so much that you don't leave her until the day she dies. I know how it feels when it happens. You don't have to pretend for me, Doctor. A little forknowledge of my daughter's fate isn't going to hurt."

"Yes. I do. She sacrifices herself to save a lot of people, myself included. I... I was a different man back then, literally, and I treated her so unfairly. She died the first time I'd ever met her. She looked at me and I could just _see _it, in her eyes, that I was going to love her and be the thing she wanted most in her life, but in that moment _I just wasn't. _I was an idiot still in love with another woman, not that loving Rose was in any way idiotic, but I couldn't be the man she looked to to hold her hand and catch her whenever she felt like jumping out a spaceship or off a building. It wasn't the sacrifice she made that killed her. _I _did. I looked straight into her eyes and said, 'Who are you?' Those three words shredded her heart and she knew if she didn't sacrifice herself she would never ever see me again. Imagine looking at Rory and him giving you a blank stare. Like he didn't know you. And that that moment would be the exact moment that you wouldn't see him again. It would kill you, like it did her." He wouldn't look at her, and tears dripped down his angular cheeks.

"Somehow I knew that she didn't exactly grow old with you. She's just not that type of person. Live fast, die young. And she loves you more than you think. After we left her with the Sisters of the Infinite Schism, she managed to teleport into my room. She nearly collapsed, the Vortex Manipulator had some funny effect on her. But she was crying so hard- couldn't understand why'd you'd just leave her after telling her you loved her in her diary. Said it took her two months to work out how to get into the TARDIS, but now that she had, she didn't want to see you. I held her all night until she finally said, 'I love that man for more than we're both worth. But he'll be the death of me. Just like how I was the death of him.' She destroyed time for you. She _does _love you."

"I know that she loves me. That's the problem- she sacrifices herself for my well-being more than she should. Do you know how long she could've _lived _if it wasn't for me?"

She stepped forward to pull him into a hug, letting him cry into her shoulder. "The only thing that matters is she did it out of love."

"Don't tell anyone." His voice was extremely low, quiet and hoarse. "Please."


End file.
